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China has called on the United States to abandon its “biased views” after US State Secretary Rex Tillerson criticised it for undermining the international rule-based order with its South China Sea actions and New Silk Road infrastructure financing deals.

“China steadfastly upholds the international order with the United Nations at the core,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said on Thursday in a press briefing in Beijing.

“We hope that the United States can put China's development and China's positive role in the world into perspective, abandon its biased views of China,” Lu said.

The state secretary said the US seeks constructive ties with China but accused its “provocative actions in the South China Sea” of directly challenging the international law and norms that the United States and India both stand for.

China claims most of the waters and islands in strategically significant South China Sea, defying a ruling by an international arbitration court last year.

Emerging US alternative to Belt and Road initiative?

Tillerson’s speech, which came ahead President Donald Trump’s visit to China next month, has been regarded as a possible first sign of the Trump administration’s emerging counter-strategy towards China’s Belt and Road initiative.

Under President Xi Jinping’s hallmark initiative first unveiled in 2013, China is planning hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of investments into ports, roads and rail links stretching from Asia to Europe and Africa.

Projects underway include rail and highways linking China’s Xinjiang to the Gwadar port in Pakistan, the Khorgos “dry port” on the Chinese-Kazakh border, and the high-speed rail link aimed at connecting the Chinese-owned port of Piraeus in Greece to Central and Eastern Europe.

Tillerson criticised China’s infrastructure deals abroad, claiming they often don’t create jobs for the locals and that the financing in these deals is structured in a way that can result in the Chinese ownership of the projects.

He also revealed that the US has begun a “quiet conversation” with countries in the Asia-Pacific about their infrastructure and development needs.

“We think it’s important that we begin to develop some means of countering that with alternative financing measures, financing structures”, Tillerson said.

“We will not be able to compete with the kind of terms that China offers, but countries have to decide: What are they willing to pay to secure their sovereignty and their future control of their economies? And we’ve had those discussions with them, as well,” he said.

Earlier this month, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis criticised the Chinese initiative in a Congressional hearing, saying that “in a globalized world, there are many belts and many roads, and no one nation should put itself into a position of dictating 'one belt, one road'.

The US sent a delegation led by National Security Council Senior Director for East Asia Matt Pottinger to the first Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in May.